NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 Released

hubertf writes, "The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 releases are now available. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bugfixes, security updates, new drivers, and new features like support for Xen3 DomU. NetBSD 3.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 3.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 3.1 Release Announcement and the NetBSD 3.0.2 Release Announcement for more information."

Re:I don't get it

[kv9]

What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 2 year-old Gentoo Linux installation? The BSD's have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Could someone enlighten me?

firs of all, nobody is trying to make you switch. the BSDs aren't out to conquer the world (AFAIK), they just try to make proper operating systems.

second, you get:

• totally sweet firewalling, with ipf [gw.com] and pf [gw.com]
• proper package management with pkgsrc [pkgsrc.org] (your beloved portage? that's where it gets its roots)
• the ability to run the same configuration on dozens of different archs [netbsd.org] (that might not sound like much, if you only run i386, but there's people with lots of different gear out there)
• a clean, small, stable base system which includes everything you need to get your server going in a few minutes (literally, NetBSD installs in 2 minutes, even on old hardware) -- you can build on top of that, with pkgsrc or prebuilt binary packages
• run your favorite proprietary applications through the emulation layer (compat Linux, compat WIN32, etc)

and many more. you can read in detail on the project's feature page [netbsd.org]. that being said:

10:49:47 (1.15 MB/s) - `i386cd-3.0.2.iso' saved [209747968]

Re:I don't get it

[debilo]

Uhm, you do know that you can do system administration on the command-line in Linux too, right? (And I bet that there are GUI administration tools for the BSD's too, for that matter...

Yes, Mr. Romero, that's quite obvious, and I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote. I wasn't complaining about the lack of a CLI on Linux or the lack of GUI utilities in BSD. Most of the big Linux distributions come with pretty installers and widgets, and they encourage their users to use those instead of the CLI, so naturally most Linux users who try out one of the BSDs for the first time are rather taken aback by the focus on the CLI and are quick to consider the BSDs old-fashioned and not up the par with Linux. Yes, there's PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, both of them provide nice installers and GUIs, and I also know of Webmin; I was merely pointing out that I find working on the CLI in BSD more comfortable than clicking widgets in Linux, probably due to BSD's more central approach regarding the system layout, compare /etc/rc.conf in BSD to all the runlevel config files in Linux. I never got the hang of them, but again, it's a matter of taste. I just don't want new users to be discouraged by the lack of widgets in BSD as opposed to major Linux distros.

Here's a pretty interesting thread [freebsdforums.com] by a BSD user who had to learn to use Debian at work and shares his experiences. He sums up the differences between FreeBSD and Debian quite nicely. Makes for an interesting read.

Re:I don't get it

[LizardKing]

If you like source based packaging systems, then NetBSD is a better choice than Gentoo. I have the misfortune to work with someone who insists on using Gentoo on his work machine. He's a lazy sod, but even if he wasn't he would still be unable to do much work because usually his machine is either grinding through another rebuild or awaiting a reinstall because a half-baked update has rendered it unbootable. If you want binary packages, the quarterly releases of pkgsrc are excellent - and far more reliable than Debian in my experience (for instance, GCJ has been dumping core for at least a week on the Debian box here at work - I'm about to see if this mornings update cures it).

As someone else pointed out, the command line tools are the usual way to configure a BSD system. It should be emphasised though, that compared to Linux the tools are far more consistent and better documented. This is true of all the BSD's but especially OpenBSD. Compare this with Linux where the tools are from disparate sources, and the man pages are often omitted or incomplete. Yeah, there might be an out of date HOWTO on the web that can help, but that's not much use when your trying to get a machine online in the first place. The consistency of the BSD's is a consequence of developing a complete operating system, not stitching together the entire system from a mass of poorly integrated sources.

Finally, having all the architectures built out of the same tree means far less breakage than with Linux. I've run Linux on PA-RISC and Sparc machines in the past, and it's frustrating when the vanilla kernel can only be trusted to work out of the box on x86. If you're trying to track the latest development you end up having to marshal patches from various sources in the hope of keeping things going - with NetBSD it's just a CVS update from one repository.

Re:I don't get it

[raddan]

Man pages. Lots of them. For everything, even system calls. And an experience blissfully free of dependency hell, which, as a Gentoo user, I'm sure you're quite familiar with.

Of course, you can pretty much say goodbye to bleeding edge stuff and complicated GUI apps like Ardour, etc.

Re:I don't get it

[hubertf]

> What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 6.1
> FreeBSD installation?

Support for ~50 hardware platforms.

  - Hubert

Re:I don't get it

[phoenix_rizzen]

You do need to hunt down repositories for Debian, if you want software that isn't included in the standard repos. For instance, at the time of writing for that thread (July 2005) you could not get Java, Madwifi, or KDE 3.4+ in the standard repos. To get those, I had to search the web for custom repos to use with Sarge. Not a lot of fun for a Debian newbie.

Debian may have the highest number of packages available, but it does not have the highest number of applications. A lot of the packages in the Debian repos are for the libs that come with apps, and for multiple versions of the same app with various features enabled or disabled. If you take out all those duplicates, you end up with a lot fewer apps. A lot, yes, but probably not the most.

At the time that I wrote that piece, Ubuntu was a horrid little thing that was just starting out. Kubuntu didn't exist yet, and being a KDE user, why would I try Ubuntu?

Wireless is the worst grafted-on technology in the Linux world. There are multiple wireless networking stacks, multiple WPA supplicants, multiple commands for working with wired connections, wireless connections, and device-specific options. And Debian was (at the time) one of the worst for wireless support -- there was none officially in Sarge for madwifi or wpa_supplicant. Now, in Etch, things are a bit better, but nowhere near the level in FreeBSD. Why is there an ifconfig, a iwconfig, and driver-specific commands to work with wireless links? In FreeBSD, there's only ifconfig since they are all network interfaces, there's only a single networking stack that all the devices use. There a single config file to manage the wireless side of things.

I've become proficient with Debian in the year and a bit since I posted that, but Debian in particular and Linux in general remains a conglomeration of a bunch of hacked together software projects without an overarching feeling of togetherness or unity to it. There's no cohesiveness to "Linux" even in some of the distros.

Ubuntu is moving along nicely in that area, but that only drives home the notion that there is no Linux OS, just a hodge podge of OSes built around it, each with their own ideosyncracies, and the only way to get anything done is to standardise on a single distro. People need to get out of the "Linux" mindset and into the "Ubuntu" or "Fedora" or "Debian" or "Gentoo" mindset. Once that happens, then things will probably get better ... or else it will cause the splintering of "Linux" like the splintering of Unix back in the day.

And, yes, upgrading a couple apps can result in an upgrade to the entire OS. I've done it a few times. I'll never understand the whole Linux distro concept of "the OS and apps are one". Why do I need to upgrade to Debian Etch in order to run KDE 3.5? I can run KDE 3.5 on FreeBSD 4.11, 5.5, and 6.1, it doesn't require an OS upgrade to run newer apps.

Re:For one, I'm not gonna bother

[LizardKing]

Err, no one of the founders threw a hissy fit because he'd fucked up the administrative side of the NetBSD Foundation. An ill informed "debate" on Slashdot followed. NetBSD is still going strong, often providing new features like SMP support that then filter into the other BSDs (OpenBSD in the case of SMP). Recently, a new Bluetooth stack was integrated into the main codebase and dozens of new drivers - some ported from the other BSDs, others written specifically for NetBSD. NetBSD is also the first choice of BSDs for running Xen, and has also been used to set an Internet2 Land Speed Record (improving on the previous Linux entry by 50%, despite running on a considerably slower machine).